Native Wit

Not for lack of native wit
Have cottonwoods prevailed
Upon prairie’s crusted skin.

Brief torrents of summer rain
Fill dry streambeds, soon
Give way to months of drought.

Crocus, tulip, pom-pom, azalea,
forsythia, redbud – they take their
chances with Spring’s early dare.

When, for blooming, nothing else
Remains – enter cottonwoods,
Hearty laggards of the plains.

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Image Credit: Ghostly branches of a cottonwood in spring [photography by Richard Schulte, San Diego, CA]

On Eating an Orange and Seeing God

I miss the big navels when they are not in season,
but almost any orange will do.

First, I feel how firm the orange is, rolling it in my hands,
the hands of an artist, the hands of a poet, and now the stiff
and cracked hands of an old man

then I slice it in half and look at its flesh, its brightness,
its moistness, its color—if the insides beckon,
urging my mouth to bite, I cut each half into half

and then slowly, carefully, as all rituals demand,
put one of the pieces between my longing lips,
and gradually, with a sort of grace, bite
into the flesh of the sacrificial fruit.

I feel the juice flow down my throat, recall the taste
of every orange I ever had, even in my childhood
with this little miracle of eating an orange.

As I finish absorbing its flesh, still slowly and gracefully
the last bit of what had been one of the myriad wonders
of the world, I look at the ragged pieces of orange peel
and I see poetry— or God— it’s really the same thing,
isn’t it?

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Image Credit: Abstract fluid pattern [wallpaperflare.com]

Transubstantiation

Nothing more than the accelerator
at Cern, seven-mile tunnel in the earth,
protons traveling almost at the speed of light,
voilà. Top quark, alpha god particle
said they would be there, though makes no sense.
Blood & bread. Take, this is my. . .
Not more mysterious than something
a millionth the size of a proton.
Physicists explain how it will act, react.
They say with a flourish what they don’t
understand. PhDs argue online in secret
chats where the one defensible
posture remains: ungovernable
squirm of subatomic world, wafer.

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Editor’s Notes and Image Credit: This is an American sonnet and the complementing image of a typical CMS* event displaying the Higgs boson decaying to four leptons with 2 muons (in red) and 2 electrons (in green) as final state signatures. The event was recorded with the CMS detector in 2012 at a proton-proton center of mass energy of 8 TeV. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson to a pair of photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). (Image: CERN)

* The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It has a broad physics program ranging from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson) to searching for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

Another Day, Another Year

The wind cries / I do not listen. You hold out your hand
one last time. Startled, a fox runs under the Clethra.
Clouds fill a darkened sky. I am soaked with a deluge
of tears. Mud collects at my knees. Where has the fox
gone? Needles pierce my soul, releasing blue desires.
Awash in a dream of yesterday / you never planned to stay.
I rip open my chest & tear out my heart. It washes away
with the storm / lost downstream. Another day, another year.
It might have been so different. The fox calls out, I follow.

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Editor’s Note: Clethra refers to the deciduous shrub, sweet pepperbush, in the family of Clethraceae.

Image Credit: An abstract fox [pngegg] re-colorized and superimposed on sweet pepperbush [Pinewood Farms]